weirdRe-reading sections of the beginning, I started to worry about my characterizations for that time period since it occurs between LGM3 and DMD. They feel severely off to me, and I think it's because I wanted creepy, but with zombies you could actually sympathize with. Ya, go figure out my reasoning for that!
I finally faced the fact that I needed to start over, putting Twilizone to the side. This was after I'd reworked some portions of it, adding a darker beginning to the story and a section for some inner voice stuff for Stark, all of which is incorporated back into the original fic. Since this was for
astrogirl2, I wanted him to play a prominent role in the entire thing naturally. Then I remembered I had a few lines to a potential zombie fic from last year. So I went and looked at it, got excited about it but I couldn't work on it since it was like 1 or 2am and I had an early start the next day. But what I wanted to write kept running in my head: To do the story from the POV from an intellant virus that is the source of zombie infection, with thoughts from those infected echoing within the piece. Then I freaked when I saw something
kernezelda posted: an awesome ficlet written from Stark's POV. I kind of threw my hands up in the air and thought 'there goes my story idea.' I felt absolutely freaking miserable. I have this thing where I don't want anyone to think that I copied off of someone else's style (unless it's within a deal like 
farscapefriday), and I was/am terrified that someone will think that this is the case here. Especially since the posting of both is so close together. So I tried it as a straight POV, without the extra thoughts included. I wasn't happy with it. At least not completely, so I put them back in. I was happier with the story, though still worried about what others would think. When Kerne said she'd do the second beta despite not liking zombie fic, I was shocked but doing the happy dance because I was dying to find out if they were too similar in style. She told me the truth and it made me feel a whole hell of a lot better. I still almost went with the second to last version, but said screw it. It's not often that I'm happy with what I write anymore so I went for it. Ta-da!
